


Of Karma and Chaos

by Kiyleeee



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess, Young Hercules
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-16
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-29 13:15:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/687366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyleeee/pseuds/Kiyleeee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Strife is ripped from Ancient Greece to the Mouth of Hell thanks to the Scooby Gang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Karma Must Be Balanced, From Time to Time

**Author's Note:**

> I started this story in 2009. It is also posted at Twisting the Hellmouth. It is a work in progress (sorry) that I am making a mean attempt at updating regularly. Since I've been working on it for so long I've undergone some improvements in writing style and grammer, which I am sure are reflected in the work. I heart constructive criticism. Thanks loves.
> 
> Oh! Since I am reposting here I will make a great attempt to fix a few things in the early chapters that I never got around to before. This is the longest note my story will have, I think. I generally despise notes. 
> 
> Disclaimer: Joss owns all recognizable Jossverse. Someone else owns recognizable Xena and Hercules characters.

The pale, brunet god contemplated the crowd of children as they gleefully pulled the laundry off the line it had been strung out on to dry earlier that morning. He pondered what they were planning to do with it, but judging from the massive bursts of energy he was receiving it was going to be a doozy of a prank.

The village was tiny and quaint. There were the prerequisite rolling green hills off in the distance. The children raced through a field of olive trees and then onward down one such picturesque green hill dotted here and there with yellow flowers towards a fowl smelling shanty. There were several large sows rooting in a muddy paddock nearby. Strife, who had been invisibly following the herd of tittering children started to smirk as he realized that they were heading for a pig shelter. The tallest of the children who appeared to be the brains behind the operation jimmied the door of the shelter open while several of his accomplices waited impatiently. One little girl looked slightly unhappy to be there and Strife sighed as his pale blue eyes perused her. That little urchin would be the first to crack when it came time for punishment. There was a victorious exclamation as the lock on the door gave and several of the clothing bearing children preceded the tallest boy inside. Strife peeked through a hole in the side of the shanty and happily watched as they threw the laundry over a rope that was hanging across the inside of the shelter for some unknown reason. 

Strife began to chuckle. The person who's laundry was currently having 'essence of swine' added would be in for one unpleasant surprise. He would be getting energy bursts from this one every day for two weeks until laundry day rolled around again in the village. He would have to do something special for these children some day soon. The tall, lean god turned to contemplate the sun trying to figure out how long he had been wandering the Greek countryside today checking up on his most dedicated followers. The rays from Apollo's chariot glinted off of the safety pins holding together the form fitting black leather of his outfit. Strife crossed his arms and tapped a finger on his chin trying to decide whether or not to go back. Finally, he shrugged deciding he had wrought enough havoc for the day. He flashed back to his Uncle's temple, giggling. 

Strife flashed in behind one of the pillars in the Audience chamber of the temple. He stealthily edged around until he could see Ares' throne. The large, black stone chair was empty and Strife hummed his annoyance. He walked out into the center of the chamber and put his hands on his hips tapping his foot while he decided where to look next. In keeping with a daily tradition he had started at the age of 7 the leather clad god turned on his booted heals and stuck his tongue out at a rather badly wrought statue of his mother, Discord, gracing one dusty corner of the intimidating stone room before he turned and walked down a side hall towards his volatile Uncle and boss.

For once, the large, muscled form of Ares didn't seem tense as Strife barged unannounced into the "war room" (a.k.a. messy office). Several of Ares' battle plans were coming to fruition. Ares thoughtfully tugged on his beard as he frowned at his maps. The frown was thoughtful today instead of thunderous.

"Anything ya need me ta do, Unc?" Strife asked as he plopped down on the edge of his Uncle's ebony black desk. He looked around the bright office at the piles of scrolls heaped on side tables and the three, large, uncomfortable chairs in front of the desk. Several scrolls rolled off of the desk and bounced noisily along the floor. Strife did his best to control the impulse to scramble to gather them and just beamed at Ares instead. He leaned over to quizzically look at his Uncle's battle plans. 

"Not really," Ares muttered as he released his beard. One heavily muscled arm reached out and grabbed a piece of charcoal. He sketched in some tentative new routes on the map for his warlords to attack an upstart named Callisto. She had moronically tried to murder his daughter and his daughter's lover, Gabrielle. Even if he couldn't stand his daughter and her do gooder attitude he couldn't allow this slight to her. It would be horrible for his reputation.

Strife pouted, his lower lip briefly going out, and sighed. He was bored. He started twitching his right foot nervously. He was bored and when he got bored he inevitably got into trouble by making a nuisance of himself. He felt a tingling sensation and imagined he could already feel the energy blast slamming into his body. He would eventually provoke one out of Ares, no matter how amenable his mood, if he didn't find something to do with himself quickly. He was swinging his legs and lightly thumping his heels off of the front of the large, black desk when he abruptly stopped moving entirely. The silence and stillness tickled at Ares attention, as he was used to the minor hindrances to his concentration that Strife brought into a room with him, but he was too intent on his maps to look at his nephew.

Strife, for his part, was starting to feel light headed. He had in the past suffered from what Apollo had termed "panic attacks" due to his somewhat unique childhood, but there was no reason for him to be feeling that way in his Uncle's sun filled office. He tried to find a quiet place in his mind to force the feeling away, but he was beginning to suspect an external source. His eyes darted around the office and he started to feel queasy. The tingling was spreading and getting more intense. His skin felt like it was going to crawl off of his body-like thousands of eyes were watching him all at once. His breath hitched before picking up pace. "Unc?" Strife whispered in a worried tone.

"What?" Ares snapped, still not really paying attention. He was sketching out some intricate battle plans that he wasn't sure his substandard warlords would be capable of executing.

"I think something is wrong," he again whispered in a scared, small voice. 

Ares eyes immediately darted to his usually cocky, boisterous nephew. Strife's already pale skin was as white as a shade in Hades. There was a sonic boom in the office and Ares instinctively ducked behind his heavy, wooden desk. His reflexes were honed from centuries of battle and 200 years of Strife's high jinks. Strife was frozen in terror as a portal of blue flame opened above his head. The flames exploded downward and appeared to consume the frightened, young god. The windows of the office exploded outward raining millions of glass particles glinting like diamonds in the sunlight down on Ares startled priests. The next second there was another sonic boom and the flames, along with Strife, were gone. The sun was shining innocently through the empty window panes into the office. Ares stuck his head up from behind his desk to look around himself. He cautiously stood up and walked around his desk half expecting to find Strife giggling to himself, hiding on the other side. 

Perplexed Ares looked around. "What the fuck?"

Ares was talking to an empty room. He could hear his alarmed priests clamoring down the hallway toward his office...err...War Room. 

"Strife?"


	2. Karma Doesn't Care If You are Concussed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As far as a time line and possible things that could push this story into AU: This story is set after Spike got chipped. Xander never got together with Anya (I really don't like the idea of her in this story and I think it would just turn into Anya bashing if she were hanging around), so Xander has just been spending his time palling around with Spike and the rest of the Scooby gang instead of giving Anya orgasms. This is after Dawn came but I am going to be fudging the time line a bit because Willow has honed her uber magic capabilities for the purposes of this fiction. For now I think that is all that might irritate people if I don't mention it.

The wind was blowing clouds across the moon at an alarmingly fast pace, slowly sinking the Sunnydale Cemetery into an even more impenetrable, inky blackness. Xander looked on worriedly and had a bad feeling from the tips of his toes to the top of his brunet head. He hated it when Willow was doing magic like this because whenever there was a foul up (though admittedly she had gotten better at NOT screwing up) he was inevitably the one that paid for it. Willow's eyes were doing that creepy, glowy, black thing and the delicate witch was starting to levitate several inches above the ground. Her short flame red hair was flying around her head moved by a force ten times greater than that chasing the clouds across the sky. Add all this to the fact that the spell she was deeply immersed in had to be performed on consecrated ground for some godless reason- Xander found himself yet again in a graveyard in the dead of night. Xander huffed. He was not having a great day, or for that matter even a mediocre day.

Willow was supposedly doing "High Magic". Xander had kind of tuned out here and there while Willow was explaining the finer points of the differences between the magic she was performing now and the more earthy, natural magic she usually practiced, but he understood that this was allegedly much more temperamental. That scared the shit out of Xander because he vividly remembered being chased around town by crazed women after the extremely structured magic Amy performed. He couldn't even begin to fathom what might happen tonight if everything didn't go as it should.

There were subtle differences in the set up for the spell that Xander was able to recognize from many nights helping Willow set up spells. There was a very large protective circle around the whole spell area, but inside the large protective circle there was actually a series of several smaller circles set up to contain whatever demons or planar beings were summoned. It bothered Xander that there had to be more than one containment circle. In his experience the need for more protection from something was directly related to the creature in question's ability to rip his head off. Willow had explained it as a "fail safe", which only, in the end, panicked Xander more because there was now the idea floating around in his head that one of the containment circles could fail. He had the wiggins about the whole endeavor, but he manned up anyway because he knew Willow would just do it alone if he didn't.

The latest apocalypse trying to strike down the denizens of Sunnydale was a group of High Magicians calling themselves The Brotherhood of Ahriman. Giles had explained in agonizing, long winded detail that these jackasses were summoning "daevas", which were apparently a special kind of desert demon, and sending them terrorizing through town, so that "The Brotherhood" (Xander snickered every time Giles said this much to his eternal annoyance) could gather Chaos energy from the fear they inspired. It wasn't too hard for them to do that either because Xander had almost pissed himself when he saw one of the giant snake men chasing a pack of drunken frat guys down a sidewalk about two hours earlier. Xander sighed remembering. What was it with this place and giant things that always wanted to eat him?

Giles was pretty sure The Brotherhood of Ahriman was storing this Chaos energy in a statue of Ahriman- a 6 foot tall Snakeman statue. Then when they had enough energy stored, of course, they were going to perform the real magic that they wanted to execute and open the Hellmouth. Because hey, who doesn't want hell on Earth? Giles, in all his bookish authority, thought that The Brotherhood was under that impression that whatever came out of the Hellmouth would be grateful to them for releasing the barrier. They thought that Ahriman would come out with the rest of the demons stuck in hell dimensions and be bad ass enough to reward them and make them kings, or at least high ranking feudal lords, of the new hell. Why did no one ever realize that to most things that go bump in the night humans are just tasty?

Xander hummed worriedly to himself as, unbelievably, Willow levitated higher and the wind around her kicked up even more. She was chanting rapid fire in a ghostly, hollow voice, first in Latin and then another unintelligible language that sounded vaguely like something he had heard her use when she was petitioning Hecate to de-rat Amy. He started to sweat as he wished he had paid more attention during their prep session. With so many dooms days on his horizon it was just hard to give each one the attention it deserved. Gods, he was pretty sure he was going to bomb his history test on Thursday, too. He gritted his teeth as an odd herbal smell permeated the air and drifted into his senses. Random smells, was that part of the plan?

Plan A went as follows: While Buffy and Spike went off to find the Brotherhood of Ahriman and maim them mercilessly, Willow would summon whatever would be best to absorb the Chaos energy the snakey daevas had generated and that the brotherhood was trying to use as a half-assed battery for their whole, completely unoriginal, opening the Hellmouth scheme. In essence, Willow was hoping to cut the baddies off at the pass. The spell Willow had chosen was murky on the details of what would be summoned, but it seemed like the best one for what they needed done so she wanted to forge ahead anyway. Normally, Giles wouldn't let Willow perform such powerful spells without hovering nearby exuding a stern, fatherly presence and knowing the exact outcome of what she intended to do. That is why Willow hadn't asked Giles to help her prepare. One, there was no time...two...he would have outright vetoed the idea. Better to seek forgiveness later than outright defy their fearless leader's Watcher.

As the whirling wind blew the pungent, botanical smell more directly into Xander's face he crossed his fingers and contemplated the feasibility of crossing his toes in the hopes that whatever Willow pulled into the containment circle wouldn't ooze puss, smell bad, have tentacles, or be a giant bug. He'd had enough of enormous, scary things for one night. It didn't matter though because they were supposed to banish whatever was summoned as soon as it was done acting like a Chaos energy sponge. At least, Willow assumed she would be able to banish it.

Plan B: Run, quick like a bunny, from the "it" they summoned and hope Buffy would be able to kill "it" with Spike's help after it absorbed a shitload of Chaos energy. Xander tried to cross his big toe over the smaller toe next to it inside his worn down sneakers.

Willow was about a foot and a half off of the ground now and Xander saw the salt circles on the ground begin to glow before they burst into bright, blue flames. A loud boom announced a portal ringed in the same bright, blue flames. It opened above the innermost 6 foot radius, flaming circle. A limp body tumbled through the portal and impacted harshly with the unforgiving ground. Another loud percussion rent the air and the portal ceased to exist. At the same moment Willow collapsed from the energy drain caused by mentally keeping the portal in the correct spot above the containment circles. As Willow collapsed her focus wavered and the blue flames that had chased away all of the shadows in their immediate, grave strewn vicinity dwindled and died out. All of their candles had blown out and they were thrown into near pitch blackness. The street lamps on the sidewalk outside of the cemetery were alarmingly distant and Xander's eyes had no time to adjust to the darkness. Everything was silent.

"Willow!" Xander fumbled for a flashlight as he raced to her side. He couldn't manage to turn it on and he tossed it aside in his agitation. He grabbed his best friend and shook her. She didn't respond.

"Willow you have got to wake up! This isn't good! This is very much of the bad!" She was breathing at least. Xander was in full out panic mode. He was glad he didn't have to remember his CPR training. Not only did the spell seem not to work, he didn't know what they had summoned, and all that noise and magic was bound to be a dinner bell to every thing of the creepy, crawly, bitey variety in Sunnydale. He heard a pained moan from the direction of the containment circle and froze. He slowly turned his head to look at who or whatever Willow had yanked through the portal.

"Where in Hades 'em I?" The figure on the ground said quietly. Xander looked closer. No puss or ooze, but the lanky figure on the ground looked more like a vampire than anything else in Xander's somewhat horrifyingly expansive experience. Buffy was sooo gonna be pissed off if they had summoned a vampire. 

Xander didn't understand what the man had said, but it had a quality of "WHERE THE FUCK AM I?" to it. Before he could engage his brain to mouth filter Xander blurted out, "Sunnydale, California."

Xander's eyes had by this point adjusted to the limited light and he was able to take in what appeared to be a very tall, lean man-boy?-no, man. He took a few precious seconds to appreciate the bad ass look of yards of black leather-safety pinned?-together over that long body. Unlike Spike, the man on the ground looked gentle, in spite of the leather, in an odd way. Maybe it was just the way he was holding his head as if it were concussed on second thought. He wasn't sure in the watery moonlight, but he was pretty sure he was meeting blue eyes that rivaled Spike's for color and clarity. Xander giggled as he realized he was mentally babbling. 

Strife wanly smiled as he recognized the energy of a dedicated follower. Xander's heart skipped a beat as the potentially dangerous, albeit oddly attractive, man graced him with a small curve of his lips. 

The aura around this boy dazzled Strife's godhood. The boy was rife with potential chaos and he basked in his warming glow. He had a joyful honesty spicing his energy. This boy was mischievous, but not malicious, which was a singularity in someone of his age. He reminded Strife of his favorite followers. He closed his eyes. He had never felt something so wonderful. The Fates, however, had never dictated Strife to have a quiet moment of happiness without a corresponding kick to the spiritual balls. At that moment a wave of Chaos energy hit strife hard. His body slammed back to the ground violently. Every muscle in his body seized and he arched tortuously toward the sky. Tears rolled down his face in large crystalline drops, catching the faint glow of the street lamps and reflecting it back to Xander's widening eyes. Strife was at a loss. He never received energy in such large quantities or this quickly. His body was struggling to absorb it.

Xander watched, mouth hanging open, and started crawling to the fallen god's side to help him any way he could. Willow's spell must be working. His brain whirred and he wondered if he should touch the man or not. He began whispering comforting, nonsensical gibberish to the pain wracked pale beauty writhing on the ground. There was something about the man drawing him in besides his inherent white hat desire to help everyone who needed it. He slid around after the body jerks subsided and picked the dark, messy haired head up off of the ground and placed it onto his lap. He ran his fingers between sweat soaked, brunette locks and used his shirt sleeve to wipe the tears from his bone white face.

Willow roused slightly and her eyes slitted open. She realized she needed to banish the Chaos energy and she made the fatal flaw that begins our strange tale. Willow's eyes glowed the black of the void of creation under her half open eye lids. Her melodic voice echoed with the power of a thousand sorceresses before her performing magic on windswept hills and plains. 

"I banish you, Chaos energy-inspired by evil mischief-back to the realm you originated from."

The oddly accented Greek floated to Strife's ears. As the last haunting note of the fiery haired woman's voice washed over him Strife cried out in agony, yet again, as his godhead was ripped from his body. He felt like every molecule of his being was being covered in lightening and acid. There was a blinding flash and his body glowed a bright white. The fear inspiring portal from earlier opened over Strife with another earth shaking noise and sent the white energy speeding back to Olympus. Another sound like irritated thunder and the portal was gone. Xander was momentarily blinded again. Strife passed out from pain and exhaustion. Willow passed out from the energy drain-Xander was left with two unconscious people in the middle of a graveyard, at a quarter past midnight, in Sunnydale. 

"Figures." Muttered Xander as he looked around. "Plan B then. Why doesn't anything ever go right? Fuck!"

"Because you two were mucking around with Chaos magic, you twit." Xander jumped at Spike's angry voice as he emerged from behind a large tombstone. He bent down and scooped up the unconscious man from the ground freeing Xander to move. It was a reassuring reminder of his vampiric strength. Xander giggled at the sight of Spike carrying the much larger man.

"Physics-Spike defies you!", Xander started to laugh harder.

"Great, the whelp's bloody well in shock. Can you get Red?" Spike asked pissily. "We need to move NOW."

Xander scrambled over to where Willow was sprawled limply on the ground and easily picked her up. Adrenaline was a useful thing.

"The car is this way." Spike jerked his head to the right and followed his own directions by walking off in the indicated route. Xander trailed Spike into the gloom of the cemetery. How was he going to explain this to Giles? He was suddenly nauseous. 

"Oh, gods. Giles is going to kill us, isn't he?"

Spike's merry laughter rang through the darkness chasing back the closeness of the night.


End file.
